Michael Ledwidge - Alert

Then a moment later, I watched in jaw-dropped awe as a series of whooshing, smoking orange flares streaked out from the black, cavelike gap in the building. Smoking contrails accompanied the light streaks as they skimmed inches from the sides of the now rapidly reversing BearCats. Then a string of thunderous explosions ripped chunks off the brick warehouse across the street from the target.

Glass and bricks rained on cop cars as a huge cloud of pale dust billowed, instantly obscuring and darkening the entire narrow street.

“Shit! Back it up! Back it up! We have rockets! RPGs! RPGs!” screamed a voice through the crackling radio.

My mind wobbled as the pale fog billowed over the windshield of my unmarked, leaving behind a pink-sugar dusting of pulverized brick on the hood.

This can’t be happening, I thought. It’s impossible. Am I dreaming? Am I still home in bed?

But I wasn’t home in bed. No matter how much I wanted that to be true.

War had come to Queens.

I snapped out of it as a bullet hit the asphalt just to the right of the car. I bailed left, keeping low, as I put a parked car between me and the gunfire ripping out of the rug warehouse. When there was a pause in the shooting, I bolted out from behind the parked car and across the sidewalk, pressing myself against the building’s brick.

I’d just made it when our side recovered and began returning fire. I’d never heard anything like our return fire before in my life. It seemed like a single sound — one ragged, deafening, smashing death wall of gunfire as fifty or sixty agents and cops went full auto at the building at the same time.

I was hunkered down against the brick, thinking that maybe I should head back to my car before I was hit with friendly fire, when someone blew past me in the brick-dust fog. The tall, dark figure flashed past me so fast that I was just able to recognize that instead of a raid jacket he was wearing a light-brown sweat suit with the hoodie pulled up.

And carrying a small AK-47.

Had he come out of a window? Hadn’t anyone else seen him? How had he avoided getting shot in the barrage? I wondered as I gaped at his fleeing back.

As if it mattered. I leaped up and bolted after the figure.

It was only as the speeding suspect turned the near corner that my adrenaline kicked down enough for me to realize that I’d left my radio and long gun back in the car. No time to go back now, I thought as I turned the corner, pumping my drawn Glock handgun like it was a relay baton.

I knew per the raid plan that the surrounding blocks were supposed to be in lockdown, patrolled by the local precinct, but someone must have lost the script, because the running Nigerian and I were all by our lonesomes.

When the lean, sprinting Nigerian shifted out into the street, I could see he was almost three-quarters of a block away and getting more distant by the moment. I tried valiantly to keep up, but being past forty and non-Kenyan and wearing Kevlar, I had my work cut out for me.

I cursed when I got to the corner of the next block and saw that the industrial area had become a residential one. As small houses blurred past, I pictured buses and kids going to school.

“Get down! Stay where you are!” I screamed at a woman coming out of her house with a baby in a stroller. How could this thing have gone wrong so quickly?

I’d just made the next corner when I saw the Nigerian start firing at a tow truck passing through the intersection. The driver didn’t have a chance as his side window blew in. The truck jumped the curb and smashed into the side of a C-Town supermarket.

The Nigerian wasn’t trying to get away, I realized as he ran into the supermarket. He was on a suicide mission, out to kill as many people as possible.

I’d just made the corner past the honking crashed tow truck when automatic gunfire boomed from inside the supermarket and the glass on the market’s sliding doors shattered into a million pieces. I dove headfirst beside the truck as screams came from inside, followed by more gunfire.

Wait or go? I thought. Then I climbed back up on my feet, keeping low as I crunched over the broken glass into the store. I swung my Glock over the open produce section on the left. Nothing. No one. I peeked into the first aisle. Again nothing — just cereal boxes.

I broke into another run when I heard screams and then gunfire at the back of the store, in the far right-hand corner. When I got there, I saw the Nigerian raking gunfire over the butcher and fish counters.

I fired my Glock — emptied it at the figure so fast I thought maybe I’d forgotten to fully load the fifteen-round magazine. I reloaded and trained it on the Nigerian as I walked over.

He was down on his back wheezing as he lay in the refrigerated meat case. The hoodie had come down now, and I could see for the first time that it was a woman.

I couldn’t believe it.

A tall, regal black woman. Smooth, dark skin shining with sweat and blood from the bullet wound in her jaw. She was still alive. She looked at me, dazed. Then she seemed to notice that the small AK-47 was still in her lap.

“Don’t do it!” I said. “Don’t!”

But she wouldn’t listen.

She went for the gun, and I shot her twice more as the gun in her hand fell over the rim of the meat case and clattered to the worn linoleum.

“Mike! Mike!” said Emily at my back when I knelt in front of the woman a minute or so later. “Mike, are you okay? Are you hit?”

“No,” I said. “What happened out there? Did we get them?”

“We got them, all right. Our intel was FUBAR. There were twenty of them, Mike. They all fought to the death. They’re all dead.”

“Did we lose anyone?”

“No, thank God. An agent was shot in the calf, but he’s going to be fine. Are you sure you’re okay?”

I nodded, sweat pouring off my chin and cheeks. I shook my head at the Nigerian woman’s brains on the glass of the meat case, her blood on the plastic-wrapped packages of sausages and drumsticks.

I stood there searching her face, her expression, her eyes for something — anything — that might explain any of this.

But even after another minute, I didn’t see a damn thing.

Apprehensive, angry, and still very much stunned numb, I peeled myself away from the incredible Queens crime scene at a little past one in the afternoon. I looked out at the rubble and the pockmarked, bullet-scarred brick walls as I put the unmarked into drive.

“Welcome to Beirut, Queens,” I said to myself as I peeled out around a just-arriving news van.

I decided to head home.

First I showered, then I threw my clothes into the wash, since they were making the apartment smell like a firing range. As the machine filled with water, I poured myself a stiff measure of Wild Turkey and cracked open a bottle of Bud and sat on the couch in the blessedly silent apartment.

Probably not what four out of five doctors would recommend at quarter to two in the afternoon, but it actually did the trick. My hands stopped shaking, and I was momentarily able to get the image of the dead Nigerian woman’s brains out of my mind.

I was well into my next round of Irish therapy when the phone rang. It was Chief Fabretti. I sipped bourbon and listened idly as he chewed my ass about the raid. I wasn’t completely sober, but somewhere in there I caught the implication that he thought I might have been responsible for all the deaths.

I decided to hang up on him and shut off my phone.

“There. Much better,” I said as I poured another drink.

I was busy making dinner when Seamus came in around two thirty. Corned beef was on the menu tonight. Being an Irishman from New York, I of course did it the Jewish way, deep-sixing the cabbage and replacing it with rye bread — heavy on the caraway seeds — and mustard to make huge Carnegie Deli — style sandwiches.